Tuesday, 23 June 2009

This is the first of a multi-part episode. Unusually though this story arc is going to be spread over a number of years and is in fact still an on-going saga.

Flashback to June 2006

Getting the overall design for the first site was pretty easy, although I hadn’t appreciated just how difficult it is to come up with words and content. Luckily I had inherited a whole bunch of lovely prose from the previous owner of espadrille.co.uk and with a few flowery sentences of my own I was there. I prototyped the layout of the site in Word, to get an overall feel for what I wanted, then handed that over to Dr Aich with the proviso that he could throw it all away if he could think of anything better, which of course he could.

What every website needs, even if it’s for information only, is great pictures and we all have at least one camera don’t we, so how hard can that be? Yes, you’ve already guessed the answer.

My daughters Olympus Mju compact had enough mega pixels to support a Nasa mission, so we started snapping away. It was around this point I finally realised just how difficult it was going to be. How do we arrange this stuff? We have dozens of lines, what do we photograph? It’s all got big creases in it from packing and they look dreadful in the photos and we can’t afford to write off stock just for this. We snapped away all evening at tea towels hanging from various parts of the kitchen and pictures of oven gloves and bread baskets on the counter, but it quickly became apparent we needed professional help. Of all the photo’s we took I believe only one remains on the site now and those that were used back then needed some serious digital ironing from Dr Aich’s team, but this was only the start of the nightmare.

Thankfully, Mrs G knew a professional photographer from up the road and enlisted his help, at a cost of course. Mrs G thought working with a professional was going to be easier than listening to the stream of expletives coming from her husband, but little did she know…